


Spiders In Her Hair

by basically_thearlaich



Series: Short and Shallow [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Greek gods, Greek myth - Freeform, Hades/Persephone - Freeform, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Not Really A Rape Of Persephone, Parallels, Temporary Character Death, not much showing, so much telling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 11:46:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17939072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basically_thearlaich/pseuds/basically_thearlaich
Summary: Bellamy muses on the parallels between the greek gods and the people around him; especially Clarke and Roan





	Spiders In Her Hair

**Author's Note:**

> writing practice with Roarke // Title taken from the Song: Spiders in her hair by King Dude // please enjoy

 

 

 

 

> _And the girl was amazed and reached out with both hands to take_  
>  _the lovely toy; but the wide-pathed earth yawned there_  
>  _in the plain of Nysa, and the lord, Host of Many,_  
>  _with his immortal horses sprang out upon her - the Son of Cronos, he who has many names_  
>  _He caught her up reluctant on his golden car and bare her away_
> 
> \- ([coloricioso.tumblr.com](https://coloricioso.tumblr.com/post/149048219628/hades-and-persephones-myth-2) )

 

*****

 

His first reaction is to think of himself as Zeus because he's undisputedly the oldest among them and feels like a father to most but he jerks back from the idea almost immediately because... Man, Zeus. What a dick. And then of course... Zeus’ dick. And then he has a reluctant moment of self-actualization because ‘Whatever the hell we want’ and provoking the Jaha Prince by heeding his call lazily and topless while Roma giggled on her walk of pride past the two of them.

So maybe... Maybe Zeus.

He thinks of Kore when he thinks of O. Although less and less the more he revisits the idea during his penance as janitor – she becomes Melpomene then. Until they hit the ground and although the moniker he has donned her does seem to follow his sister in some way or another still, he senses inklings of Nike's wings on her shoulders in the way she emerges from every pile of rubble ever sent by the Moirai to bury her (literally or figuratively). He doesn't think of the fact that Nike had been a daughter of Styx, who held the border between this life and the next, or that Nike had been sister to Zelus, Bic and Kralas - all awe-inspiring in their own way. (He still shies back, then, to see Ares in her of all people. She's his sister.)

And he can see Hephaestus in Raven, nowadays more so than at the beginning when she'd merely been the first mechanic they'd had and so glaringly talented with whatever tool she got her hands on. The one who made their first bomb (that short-lived eruption that saved them as much as it doomed them). The one who'd had a fair and gentle lover in Finn who just _had_ to be Aphrodite – pretty boy going astray in the name of his loves.

At first, logically, this would make Clarke Ares but when he looks at her then all he could see is a halo of blonde hair framing an unblemished, white face and an idealistic streak a mile wide. Hestia – he tries. But mentally blurs the moniker when she becomes complicit to his methods getting a Grounder to talk in order to save one of theirs.

Harpocrates, he thinks scornfully (angry at the thought; that it would even _come_ to him in such a moment), when Lincoln won't say a thing. Not even to ease his pain. Not even to his sister despite the fact that he saves her life within mere minutes when he would have let Finn die without batting as much as an eyelid. The more he gets to know ‘the man behind the grounder’ though, the more he sees Athena in him.

Clarke morphs within the steady hands of Asclepius and Bellamy wonders how he could have overseen it. The Surgeon in the healer.

But that's before she shuts the door to the Drop-Ship and burns three hundred grounders at the push of a button. That's before she sinks the final knife into a wound she has sutured for the boy she's held in her heart to spare him from a death more gruesome than they'd considered possible. That's before she sends him into the belly of the beast and he thinks maybe Zeus would never have found himself hanging upside down (that was another God-father of another world with another reason).

When she brokers an alliance with the horde of grounders that had been their enemies beforehand in order to break the mountain, he returns to that thought, sees the Helm of Awe on her when her eyes glue themselves to the screens and she doesn't dare close them against the terror she is wreaking with the lever they have pulled. Ares – he decides then, when they leave the mountain, when he guides their people out of their prison and through the cruel, chaotic (necessary) bloodshed.

And then, when she shakes her head, tears already in her eyes, _awake_ from the nightmare – only it hadn't been a figment of their imagination – he thinks Daphne. He has half the mind to be Apollo, half the mind to give chase.

But he can't. Because she's asked him to take care of their people (and she's not Hera, she's not a wife, she's not a protector of mothers, but she's his equal more than not and he heeds her almost naturally).

 

*** 

 

The whispers of the forest-clan reach them and the rightness of pegging her Ares has never tasted so bitter.

When, one after another, the remaining 47 come to him for help and for closeness in the camp, he learns to feel like their father indeed but he figures that, really, Kane and Abby would more easily be Zeus and Hera (even if the betrayals take another form) and he wonders what that makes him for the first time in a long while.

 

***

 

Clarke doesn't so much return as she turns up in the clutches of a man who is as dark as Hades and Bellamy doesn't even question the instinctive nomination. Roan kom Azegda fits the bill almost too perfectly.

Only Bellamy has always considered Hades a misunderstood misfit, the one who took the Shadowed Throne because he would see neither of siblings in the darkness. The eldest who had protected his brothers and sisters in the stomach of his own father, the eldest who would not _want_ the others to have to return to darkness and the watch over the grave of their own father. He must have seen darkness too frightening to behold; darkness he, if he was truly an older brother, would want to keep from his siblings.

The King of Many.

The Rich One.

He has always felt a kind of kindred with Hades.

He feels nothing of the sort when he watches the man hold a knife to Clarke's throat in order to get them to Lexa – to a turn-coat who would kill to possess the power of Wanheda.

 

***

 

Lexa kills a queen of blood-thirst and violence instead (a Titan in her own right) and raises a nameless warrior to the station of King and Bellamy cannot help but think that Clarke might have known. That she might have _hoped_ for his survival when it would have been so much easier, likely on all of them, to see him dead and dealt with politically speaking (but he's been seeing Athena's strategy in Lexa’s movements and he knows, this too has a _reason_ even if he doesn't like it).

Or maybe it's just the way their eyes talk even over the distance where their words would have been swallowed by the ruckus around them.

And yet... He cannot deny nor ignore the way the bright-skinned thing of a pseudo-commander and the dark-featured shadow of a King pull to each other as if magnetic. The way Clarke’s voice trembles when she calls the man a _friend_ (Bellamy knows the value that friends have to Clarke).

He is at her back then, protective of her small body in this mass of giants and manticores one of which is easily a woman he would have considered an ally a few months ago (the bright fire in her, the one that confused and beckoned him at the same time shines bright enough this time for him to see Nemesis’ grim snarl in its light).

 

***

 

She swears fealty to Hades and something tugs at him at the sight of crimson blood smearing two palms like the juice spilling from two halves of a pomegranate. He swallows reflexively around the sentiment and banishes it before the thought can take real form.

But then comes the truth about Polaris, in the middle of ALIE’s invasion, and The Flame falls into their hands and he can see desperation in Clarke's eyes. It's the same light that has made her reach for a lever and push a button. It's the one that tells him that, no matter where she might stand with Roan right now, she should talk to him before she does whatever it is that needs to be done (because he's certain that it needs to be done; he's never seen that light in her eyes under any other circumstance).

He bullies her into the King's Quarters at night and shuts the door on them. (The resulting fight makes him almost indignant – it would have felt less intimate to have to ignore a loud, moaning romp.)

 

***

 

She looks pale and dead like the body next to her pumping black blood through her own, walking a land no one can reach and he cannot dismiss the thought that this is what it must be like to have seen the Oracle of Delphi (so out of their minds that their eyes perceived another world; he wonders if Cassandra had ever laid eyes on a world of devastation as theirs and wonders if he could have believed her had he been her contemporary by sheer fascination of her words; he wonders if she could have been a writer millennia later). But when Roan kom Azgeda takes a bullet for Wanheda, gives his life for a truce he has not seemed to believe in at first, Bellamy sees Hades protecting the black-blooded Queen on the throne and the image is too jarring – too real, too raw – to deny.

Abby is easily Demeter (a woman who has borne a child and fostered many more than that, seen them through education or apprenticeship or passages of life too delicate to go through alone; she is a terrible thing and had seen him strung up before he had been able to formulate a plan of defence when ALIE had held her mind; she is wrathful and vengeful but tends to fail in this when her nature bends easier to the nurturing and harvesting and seeing seeds grow to their potential no matter their initial nature).

Mighty unhappy, too, when Clarke bends over backwards to return the broad-shouldered shadow of a King to the realm of the living (it hits him later that no one who has not been a part of the Underworld could have crossed the three rivers twice to bring back a soul). He sees Wanheda in a different light then, when she commands the King of Death through snot and tears and a desperately injected stim-shot that shocks the muscular body right up from the operating-ground after the impromptu field-surgery.

In the end, however, even with this interlude, the Moirai find a way to weave their misfortune and all their mortal efforts to the contrary come to nothing except ruffled feathers and weary crown-bearers at the brink of war and _Clarke_ still fighting for a solution.

Something foreign and agonizingly fed-up pulls his chest when he sees her struggle for the survival of thirteen clans who couldn't care less for the voice of a girl who shies back from heading a command that he comes to understand cannot be hers without the guiding presence of a very particular _other_ at her side.

He doesn't know when he has made peace with the fact that it is no longer him to fill that specific spot. Making the decisions alone has never ended well for either of them, and while Clarke will blunder just as badly as he will if left entirely alone, he has learned the value of a _Sekken_ from Octavia and the Trikru as he has gotten to know them.

 

***

 

As such, he feels entirely at home guarding her six, when Clarke does make the call he could not have and exchanges Pike for Emerson, trading the men while firmly holding the gaze of only the coal-deep hollows-for-eyes of the revived King of Azgeda. The transaction is more than just that – _jus drein, jus daun_ is more than that – and when Clarke bears witness to wamplei kom thauz kodon of their former teacher with a straight back and stony face, giving no single indication that she can hear the man's pleas for his life, his appeals to the nature of the girl he has taught, Bellamy sees Persephone in Wanheda. Sees her carrying into effect the curse of men upon this soul.

There is something unholy in the shine of King Roan's eyes when they lock on her, as if judging her and finding her worthy (he has seen that ominous shimmer in his eyes before when he'd looked at Clarke; he has never before considered it could be Hades, seeing Persephone rising).

And then comes the moment of Persephone _Becoming_ and he sees the red juice of pomegranate spilling from the second mouth that Wanheda draws onto the body of Emerson after she has given him the honourable chance of saving his own life by taking hers and has won the upper hand. Her eyes are glued to those of Roan, where he stands, almost lackadaisical in his posture, propped up against a wooden support pillar – eyes lit up with that proud shine of his that makes Wanheda into Persephone and into a Queen marking her Becoming. She doesn't look away even when Emerson crumbles at her feet and Abby twists like a viper to escape the cheering mass with a moue of disappointment and distaste on her face (he doesn't tell Clarke, but he's keeping eyes on her mother lest he find her with a knife in her back and Roan rampaging politics in an act of revenge without a mitigating factor).

 

***

 

The cessation of both Emerson as well as Pike eases the coalition of the thirteen kru – Azgeda is accepted to have something like a war-time-patronage over Skai-kru with Tri-kru in a brother-bond with the Clan that fell from the skies and somehow that makes it easier when Clarke asks, hypothetically, what it would need to get the kru to step away from the brink of war over the available spots on a bunker.

A Heda.

A Queen, Bellamy thinks when he watches Roan's glittering eyes fly to hold those of Clarke even as she ventures to ask about someone called Luna (Clarke has returned from her journey into the Beyond with knowledge she hasn't had before, he is not surprised to see the kru-people have an easier time dealing with such a concept than any of their own people initially do). The Conclave cannot accept the Natblida called Luna and, not too surprisingly, especially Azgeda is outspoken against having a Heda at all.

Politically that is. He shadows Clarke as Roan's people do when the King catches her up half a day later to explain why a Heda-less Conclave would appeal to Azgeda-politicians and Bellamy's breath logs in his air-pathways when there is something dangerously close to a love confession happens – but doesn’t. _I_ _f any_ _body_ _can_ _convince mortal enemies to_ _move in_ _together..._ _I_ _t’_ _s_ _you._ He doesn't think he has heard a more heartfelt… anything before. It is as much proclamation of trust (that she will, truly, think of _all_ nations) as it is an implicitly stated go-ahead to a plan Clarke has not yet even voiced to anyone but herself but that Roan seems absolutely certain she has.

 

***

 

The King would remain right about this too. Which is when Bellamy starts to wonder, if just a little, about having such intimate knowledge of each other. Clarke winds up professing her plan to a council of closely kept and forever trusted people (surprisingly excluding her mother or Kane) and goes to search for Luna; if not for the reason the ambassadors might have thought. Roan goes as far as to see them off when they try to steal a fine pair of horses from Polis’ stables and wind up accepting the mounts that the King of Azgeda bestows onto them instead (he doesn’t miss the way a large hand comes to rest on a knee, once they’ve mounted, but he takes a page out of the book of the warriors around them and pointedly looks elsewhere).

Clarke has no intention of forcing the wild-haired warrior that he gets to know as Luna into a position she does not want, but she is Wanheda enough to do as has been done unto her. Persephone enough to mete the curse that a runaway Nymph has brought upon herself by turning her back on the people Persephone now calls her own. She steals just enough marrow to cover her needs and Bellamy is glad for the sturdy horses that carry them quick like clouds over the countryside when they high-tail away from Floudonkru and their Sea of Forgetting (he thinks he understands why Clarke has made an enemy of this one).

 

***

 

He sees the frightening pride of Hades in Roan's eyes when Clarke's rhetorical evasion makes it obvious that Luna had not been willing to give marrow (he knows she’s a better liar than that; he wonders if she thinks she deserves the punishment coming for her to leave all her abilities to deflect behind her at that moment). Abby has a few choice words to say about that – and considering the Mountain, she's not wrong to – only: Bellamy has been there in both occasions, he's helped pull the lever and this time, too, he has helped drug the leader to get done what needed doing. As he sees it, their choices had ultimately not been ‘wrong’ given the explicit desire of both parties to let the rest of the world rot if only for their own opinions. Morally debatable maybe, but not wrong. Clarke wants to give everyone a chance. He can see ‘the many before the few’ in the light of such morale (only it had not really stood up to inspection when she'd felled the mountain; it does now, is the thing).

When they realize they need hell of a lot of radiation to work Clarke’s plan as it should, it's Murphy who is helpful and proposes ALIE's mansion. She’s reluctant about bringing the other in and Bellamy understands that Murphy is an alliance they will likely have to rid themselves off once this deed has been done (it feels dirty, knowing that you are _using_ another person but Murphy has proven, time and time again, that he is loyal only to himself, that he will stab them in the back at the first given chance; they cannot quite trust someone like that much further than they can throw him, really; it’s even dirtier if he considers that, likely, Murphy is aware of this too).

 

***

 

Their motley crew hasn’t even entered through the doors of the large house (glaringly pristine and whole) when Clarke… _hesitates_ _;_ looks like she wants to run and while Bellamy sees it he cannot tell _why_ it is that Kore has made an appearance _now_ when they need Persephone. And although he wants to help, he realizes that he can’t; not when the first step he takes towards her makes her startle in the underbrush like a doe.

Hades stalks through the foliage, behind her, with nary a sound before Roan announces his presence with a gentle scuff against the forest floor and Bellamy leaves (he has had misgivings about this man and the more he looks the more he has to discard them; it’s a strange feeling). It doesn't occur to him, until later, that Clarke's experience with the Flame might have been more similar to the ALIE hallucinations of the infected than they'd originally thought, when he watches her swallow and breathe before entering the lab and sitting down to do what Jackson tells her (he’s not Abby, as he keeps insisting, but none of those present quite trust the Councillor enough to have her present).

Clarke is different when she finds herself in the laboratory. He thinks of Asclepius again but the shine in Roan’s eyes convinces him otherwise – this is where Clarke reigns. This is the place Persephone plants her seeds and sees her _S_ _pring_ , in the sterile environment of a medical laboratory.

 

***

 

Their forward momentum almost dies when not only Luna kom Floudonkru, but Abby, too, find them; when Raven has pitched a justified fit about the procurement of the marrow and when Abby has lobbied for both Bellamy's as well as Roan's physical removal much to the defiant anger of her daughter. It’s a tangled mess of histories that have begun well before any of them touched the ground and when Clarke makes for it this time, Bellamy doesn’t stop her. He wishes he could go after her, frankly, but the very least he can do now is stop the rest of the lab’s occupants follow her where she needs to breathe.

It’s not fair, probably, to place the crown of the Iron Queen onto the golden curls of a girl who has just made eighteen. Theirs is an Earth of Death and War, of Blood and Fire and if she weren’t so instinctively understanding of it, Clarke should not have to bear the burden she does. But their Princess has understood first that ‘On the Ground, every life matters’. Understood that blood must have blood before the phrase had even been uttered in her presence. Understood why some had to die in order for others to survive. And she understood the taking of lives. He wonders what would have become of the 100 if Clarke had been a Grounder.

Unsurprisingly it's the King of Ice who manages to get Clarke to go on with the original plan: save as many as possible and Hades shines through his eyes when Clarke injects the serum into her own veins rather than condemn another possibly innocent soul to a fate worse than death. _I bear it so they don’t have to._ (Bellamy wonders if he can commission Raven to make Clarke a crown of iron; he wonders if he should.)

 

***

 

Demeter almost destroys their radiation chamber and Bellamy is not surprised to hear her curse Hades and his people into a century of cold, harsh winters (he finds he dislikes it when his monikers turn out to be ever so spot on), to hear her defame him and accuse him of whatever manipulation she thinks he might have wrought on her precious daughter when the King holds her back from attacking their only salvation with a pole and a lot of hysterical strength.

They could _all_ use a break.

It’s Clarke who steps into the chamber while they are still discussing alternatives – appeasing Abby is _hard_ , but after watching a man _perish_ (he has never known the meaning of the word until he has arrived on the ground) for their experiment he is, too, wary of allowing their acting leader to duplicate the attempt. When they realize that Raven is stalling them, it’s too late and the process is already well along, Clarke lying in the chamber with her back to them; her hands cover her face and her shoulders hunch as if to protect herself from the burning ache of radiation blistering her skin.

 

She dies.

 

And it’s painfully unceremonious-- simple-- _unworthy_ of the sky-girl who had been dropped to the ground and became a Princess. Something incomprehensibly quiet snaps in him, slips out of his chest and disintegrates into mournful nothingness. He wants to howl like the winds of Tartarus’ Pits; wants his insides to crumble with a roar but all that is left is silence. Blackness. _Nothingness_. Emptiness where she has been. Nothing is left of her now.

Her body looks damnably fragile when the doors of the pod open and Roan is ever so gentle in pulling out the lifeless remnants of their Princess (-- _he caught her up reluctant on his golden car and bare her away_ \--) Murphy almost doesn’t make it out alive from where Abby just barely fails to beat him to death at the controls. Raven chokes on her tears and Jackson loses the ability to stand. Even Emori looks uncomfortable. But they are all nothing compared to the sudden stillness that takes root within him; to the sudden, quiet, realization that _he_ is now the one who will have to look out for the 100.

He doesn’t think Clarke has considered that. _I will fail them, Princess. What the fuck were you thinking._

They bear her up on a bed on the upper levels, silent and listless while trying to wrap their minds around the preparations to a farewell she deserves – Raven comms the remaining 47 to inform them. It’s unpleasant and even when Bellamy takes over half-way through it doesn’t get any better. He can barely hear himself talk (but he knows he cannot let Abby do it instead of him; he knows the war it will spark and he is not going to allow her to sully the memory of her daughter so soon after her passing). Roan wants to embalm her, as befitting a Grounder (and Bellamy can see the appeal of it, thinks it might be fitting actually) before Abby verbally slaps him into standing down and staying the fuck away from her daughter. _You’ve done enough, don’t you think._ She acquiesces to burning the body (if only so it wouldn’t have to suffer through the consequences of the radiation wave that will hit them in a few months; it’s a ludicrous thought that makes him realize how little a funeral is for the dead person rather than those remaining).

Throughout the night, Roan busies himself with the construction of the pyre – Bellamy can tell it will be a hauntingly beautiful thing; all precise angles and smooth lines; softened with the leaves and pine-needles around them; he can tell it’s not the kind of bed the King had seen himself make for their Princess – and those present take almost incidental turns at visiting the shrouded body of their Princess.

Abby stays longest (and Bellamy is not surprised that she swears to avenge her death; swears to _kill them all_ even though Clarke had gone into that pod with the intention of saving them all) and Luna the briefest (barely mourning a woman who had fought to save all of them, Bellamy has half the mind to _make her_ ).

When Roan finally comes up, it is with heavy, loud, steps that belie the weariness on the shoulders of the King. Bellamy does not feel like he’s had enough time to process Clarke’s sudden Inexistence, but he has had the time to try and wrap his mind around the meaning of her Absence from the political table of the Earth. It looks _ugly_ and he cannot keep himself from fearing that her demise spells the same fate for all of them.

The night is darkest now and in a few hours, the sun will rise, marking the beginning of a new day – marking the beginning of a new world. One without Clarke Griffin; Wanheda.

_You stupid bint._

Roan’s words contradict the gentleness with which he bends down to press his lips to the covered forehead of the woman and Bellamy… he has tried not to think about what Clarke’s death will mean for _Roan_ but now that he witnesses it, he cannot avoid such thoughts any longer. For no one else but the King has he left the room, guarding the Princess one last time. He has to get away from this though. From the sheer heartache that rolls off the broad shoulders that seem to crumble and fall, shake under a weight the man has never thought he would have to carry.

He doesn’t go far, merely out of the room, far enough to still hear when Roan slips into his mother-tongue and stutters whispered confessions Bellamy can only partially make heads or tail of – Azgedasleng is just different enough from Trig that not all words hold true – but he understands _enough_ of it. Enough to grasp the magnitude of what they lost. Of what Roan lost.

When he leaves, the King is light on his feet and heavy in his heart and day has not yet broken. Luna brings him tea to keep him awake but makes him drowsy this side too quickly for him to realize that she has drugged him. He wakes to Clarke’s bed being empty and his body being  _senseless_.

 

***

 

Stimuli – funny word that – hit his ear and he thinks if he would focus on it, he would probably be able to hear how he processes them but he feels too slow for it. Gives up on it and simply tries to listen. Something is loud. Struggle probably. He should see what it’s about. He’s the guard after all. Right. And Clarke is missing. Dead. Clarke… Kore… Persephone. Dead. Missing.

Persephone shouldn’t be missing. Hades is gonna have his head for losing an already dead body. And that of his Queen too. They can’t catch the Soul without the Body. He rears himself but the draught of Lethe makes him forget how to move his limbs. Something is loud. He should go there. See what the dead are complaining about. Moving is a chore.

His limbs don’t cooperate (he has to crawl and has never thought it would be such a struggle to do so) and the whole world is _spinning_. He feels like four-legged cotton-molasses with a heavy body and a heavy head (he wonders if it’s three heads; wonders if he’s been exposed to too much radiation and if he’s Cerberus now) trying to move through quick-sand and the tumble he takes down the stairs that makes the world go upside-down doesn’t even register in his body aside from the fact that getting up on his paws is more difficult to do after.

The door to the outside is right in front of him, open into the first vestiges of dawn where Luna’s silhouette is bent over the pool of Cocytus, bent over a large frame he knows – without seeing it properly (maybe he knows by smell) – that it’s Hades she’s drowning. _Minthe_ his senses say. Minthe is trying to drown Hades in his own river of lamentation and he knows, even before he rolls onto his side that she cannot win (but he remembers then that Demeter stamped Minthe into the ground, and Demeter is not present and how will Hades even win if he doesn’t fight).

His vision swims and his ears cackle with sudden loud splashing, and when he opens his eyes from where he’s closed them, he sees something move under the lit surface of Cocytus and then Hade’s body slips _forward_ and into the water, likely into the embrace of his own subjects. But Minthe falls after him and his fine ears prick at the sound of thrashing and yelling and then _quiet._ He still can’t see properly and his heads are turning so badly and his stomach is revolting – and vomiting in this situation is such a removed experience like… he knows he has to avoid choking on his own regurgitation but he doesn’t feel himself throwing up, except he knows he does; he hopes he does. And then there is blackness.

 

***

 

He wakes to hear the pyre burning. His heads have gone and only one remains, pounding his consciousness into pained wakefulness. His paws have morphed back into hands and fingers he can move and stretch and his body is heavy and sensitive but he feels it and pain has never felt so good before.

And there is Clarke.

Wanheda.

The Queen who has been taken by Death and returned from it.

Persephone Risen and Come Into Her Own as she moves about the remaining inhabitants of the mansion to ease them back into the land of the living from whence they had been temporarily ejected by the orchestrations of Luna (Floudonkru has forsaken their chances at survival with their leader’s actions, he knows this, and he cannot find pity for them in himself; he wonders if this is what it means to be a capital-G-grounder).

Abby cries when she wakes to the unblemished face of her daughter but is still too weak to do anything else than to pull her down against her chest where she lies. Clarke permits it. If only because she knows that this is what her mother needs right now.

Roan is the only one standing. Bellamy supposes that a near-death-experience has helped.

When the call goes through to Polis that Clarke has survived the treatment, nearly everyone wants to talk to her – Persephone bears it, Hades intervenes whenever it becomes too much. Bellamy watches and commissions the iron coronet. 

 

> _Iron?_
> 
> _Have you ever heard of the Iron Queen?_
> 
> _...O told me you had your weird moments but sure… I’ll make her an Iron Crown._

 

(Raven does spectacular work in near-to no time and with only a few, choice materials. It’s all iron and not as heavy as he had originally thought it might be when he tests it for the first time; when Raven makes him drop the coronet, he realizes that despite the fact that it looks almost _fragile_ it doesn’t even dent upon impact. It’s perfect.)

 

***

 

Their return to Polis is a joyous one that speaks of the grief the 47 had experienced in the brief period when they’d thought that their leader had gone to the Underworld without them and everyone seems to want to be touching Clarke at once. Persephone slips away for the few moments in which Clarke allows her people to ascertain themselves of her reality and her continued existence. Bellamy doesn’t stray from her side.

Neither does Roan.

 

***

 

Wanheda Klark kom Skai-kru becomes Heda. Distributes, to a chosen few, a solution that will keep them alive even through severe radiation poisoning (Bellamy feels the honour when she chooses him first, asks him to demonstrate the ease of the procedure without words; he demurs and when O comes next, he knows he has proven his worth in the court of the Iron Queen; Hades looks at him through Roan’s eyes and he thinks he might be proving himself to the King of the Underworld too). She calls for assembly and strong-arms the kru into writing their own lists. She forbids unnecessary bloodshed (but not all bloodshed, when the Councillor of skai-kru asks for clarification, because she understands that the Ground works by different rules and that to prove your worth is to, sometimes, take a life).

Roan kom Azgeda is the most trusted Councillor within the Entourage of Wanheda. Belomi kom Skai-kru her first guard (Queen’s Guard, he thinks it, but doesn’t dare voice it yet). As such, he sees the lingering... everything.

The King has seen a world without his Queen. And he has deemed it unworthy of living in. He hasn’t read, ever, of Hades actually courting Persephone but he thinks it might have looked a lot like this--

The political support in hard decisions (and later the moral support to balance the act);

The anonymous gifting of drawing-utensils and enough picturesque scenes to warrant drawing (it’s a whole block of paper and an entire set of coloured charcoal and lead pencils);

The immediate surrender of any medical supplies that Azgeda-gona find on raids to bunkers that Skai-kru have mapped and that the entirety of a conclave now raid;

The fine-quality _furs_ that mysteriously find their way into her chambers as the nights get colder.

 

***

 

When the lists have been written and the fights have been wrought, when the dissidents have been sussed out and planned for (when Echo kom Azgeda has been banished and he has needed to see to her removal with the heaviest of hearts), when everything has been said and done… There comes the time of the lock-down.

O hyperventilates but refuses to pass out through her struggle at being in a dark, confined place again. Under the ground, again (he is ashamed to admit that he’s never realized what they were doing to her mind when they’d put her under the floor-boards; he’d known she’d been afraid as a child but he had never thought she would still be years after the fact; he feels like choking for her). And when pramfaya hits, Bellamy excuses himself from his watch-duty at Clarke’s door just in time to find Roan stalking into the corridor.

(He wants to say something to the King, but Hades is glaring at him from under the thin veneer of _Roan_ and he thinks only a fool would stand between the King and his Queen now that she is in his domain. He is not one to court Death like this, but he also, actually, is. So he stands a little longer between them. Just long enough for the King’s shoulders to relax and his stance to become less aggressive. When he lets the Man pass, it is with the utmost trust that Persephone will have every chance to deny and run should she want to. _She doesn’t and they emerge from the same room the next day. And the days after that._ )

 

***

 

Politically it is more profitable for Azgeda to have an Ice-Nation Heda.

The kru might not even fight it a whole lot if the Heda in question originally derived from another kru entirely too.

A political marriage is a sound idea and given his intimate knowledge of the two of them, Bellamy thinks it might not, actually, be merely a political thing (he has observed them for close to a year now, dancing around each other in constant advance-retreat-motions and he thinks they have earned it). He stands by Clarke’s decision when she makes the announcement to the older generation of skai-kru in the bunker and gets inundated with unasked-for advices to the contrary instead.

Abby wants to behead the King. Clarke politely reminds her in a dangerously calm voice that such thinking could be considered treason and is generally punishable by death (it is, he thinks, not the first time Abby has to realize that Clarke is not just her daughter any more; but it is perhaps the most memorable occasion).

Azgeda-tradition calls for a coronation of the King’s Consort and Roan laments that they have nothing to give to her before Bellamy reveals the coronet to him and the man goes eerily quiet.

 

> _How did you know it had to be Iron?_
> 
> _Let’s say I had an inkling._

 

Hades weds Persephone under the watchful eyes of the assembled pantheon and wraps her up in the warmth of his black-cloak before the chill of the bunker can raise shivers on her skin. She feeds him wine and drinks it from his hands, and when they cut their palms, again, to satisfy the tradition of his Nation, the black bleeds from her palm and spills onto her pale skin (Bellamy knows that this dichotomy of having someone so pale bleed such saturated black is not lost on the King either; that he knows that her soul can be as black as this ink-like-life spilling from her; and that, in return, the red of his makes him more human, sometimes, than he can afford to be).

She receives the crown after her branding – and it should look barbaric but there is Rite in this, Spirit and Reason and Bellamy doesn’t look away when Kore dies forever and leaves only Persephone, now crowned and wed, walked to the dais and her throne with the blood of her wounds still dripping from her temples and not making a face. He is the first to bend his knee to the new _Azplana_ right after the King has bent to Wanheda.

 

***

 

When his own inauguration into his Stand as Sekken – and self-appointed Queen’s Guard – comes around, he chooses a three-headed wolf to be poked under his skin between the topmost notches of his shoulder-blades and Hades’ eyes shine with something like grim pride when, afterwards during the feast, he slides soundlessly to stand by the side of Persephone. He catches the look and holds it until Roan lifts a corner of his mouth in understanding.

Persephone, he has always thought, has Cerberus.

Wanheda has Belomi kom Skai-kru.

 

 


End file.
